


Father's Son

by N3333ka



Category: Doom Patrol (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-01 09:03:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18797215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/N3333ka/pseuds/N3333ka
Summary: Cliff has his scheduled breakdown and sees Kate





	Father's Son

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this because I had feels for Cliff and he's my dad and we're both kin bc we want to be human so bad but we can't remember how. I touched this up while listening to Moon River by Audrey Hepburn ö
> 
> no beta we die like cowards (mostly bc I'm too nervous to ask someone)

Red eyes whir open with a soft click and Cliff stares at the ceiling of his bedroom. The all too familiar one he’s spent a good proportion of his life, in Doom Manor, looking at. Spots of Blu Tack stare back at him like eyes, grey against the stark white, left there, unblinking. They’d previously held up photos of Cliff, the old one, no, fuck – the real one? no – fuck.  
Human Cliff, they held up photos of shitty, human Cliff, winning a shitty NASCAR race that he could barely fucking remember. It wasn’t much of a surprise that he ripped them all down in a rage a few nights ago. 

Cliff swung his bronze legs off the bed, listening to them thump on the floor. He imagined the floorboards swaying in reply, just like Larry said they did. Cliff had said sorry and Larry said it was okay, that it was kind of nice. Cliff knew Larry meant more than that, Larry knew that too, neither of them knew why he did and so both failed to say anything else.

Cliff stumbled over to the bathroom. Yes, Cliff had a bathroom, No, Cliff would not like to talk about why he’d asked for a room with one. Grabbing the sides of the sink, cool metal against cool ceramic, he turned on the tap, listening to it rush out the facet and straight into the drain. He dragged his hand through the stream of water and back again a few of times before leaving it stationary in the middle of the flow. It pooled in the groove of his palm and escaped between the cracks of his fingers. Cliff tried to remember how it felt, the coolness of it, hands gliding through it like a spoon through jelly. In his peripheral vision, he watched the movement at the bottom of the mirror before stilling, raising his gaze to look at himself fully. He tore his arm from the sink and raised it, watching the robot in the mirror do the same. He wiggled his fingers tentatively like they were sifting through water, the tap still running, quieter this time. He continued to do this for a minute or two, watching in disdain as the bronze fuck in front of him mimicked each move.  
Cliff knew that was him in the mirror. It didn’t feel like him, but he knew it was. he wished it wasn’t him, but he knew it was. 

Tipping his body forward, Cliff leaned in closer to the mirror, until all he could see were his own mechanical red eyes staring back at him. 

“Who the fuck are you,” Cliff said, voice tired, body untired, weightless and forever tensed. The robot in the mirror didn’t reply, didn’t even move in recognition that he had heard what Cliff had said. Cliff wanted to cry sometimes, but he couldn’t. Cliff wanted to scream all the time, and he could. So he screamed. Arms flailing about, cutting out of the mirrors gaze and back in again. And he screamed and he screamed and he screamed. 

“WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU.” 

Then he stopped screaming. He sighed if he could, he sighed in his mind, a long, drawn out, exhale of built up agony. He let himself fall backwards despite the human instinct in his head saying bad idea bad ideabadidea. Metal limbs crashing against every side of the small bathroom, head smashing through the towel rail, failing onto the tiles with a smack, dents on the floor, dents in his brain, jostled about. 

He lay on the bathroom floor for a while, in a void stasis, staring at the white ceiling, identical to the one in his room, yet brighter, by the slightest margin. The room went fuzzy and everything faded in and out, out of focus and eventually back. He wasn’t in the bathroom anymore. He was lying on a carpeted floor, head bent in the same crooked angle it had been after falling. This time, instead of the bathroom wall, it was propped up against velvet couches and this time, holy shit, it actually hurt. God, it all felt so real, the soft carpet beneath his hands, fleshy skin weighed down by gravity, warm sunlight seeping through windows and onto him. But he knew these feelings were just fragments from his mind, because whenever this happened, it never felt properly right, always off. Everything was how Cliff thought it should feel, never how he knew, not anymore.

Cliff dragged himself off the ground, weighted by limbs. It should’ve felt like he was normal again but no matter what, flesh, metal, he never felt like he existed in his own body, always just slightly out of frame like an arm in a picture. Nonetheless, he stumbled onto his legs and surveyed his surroundings. It was the living room in his old home, some parts of the room completely blank or whiting around the edges, places his memory couldn’t fill, even with fragmented pieces. The most prominent thing was the trophy case, filled with pictures of Cliff, hands in the air, mouth wide in triumph. A gold trophy clasped in one hand, the real thing usually right next to the photo. Medallions with the number one slapped across its metal, ribbon stringing it up in the trophy case, strips of the American red white and blue popping. Trophies of all types, melded cars racing on thin air, stuck forever in place, large cups with nothing to hold. Most were gold, some silver, some bronze. Logically, Cliff knew they should be coated with dust, but in his memory, they were handled with the utmost care, tended to every day, by everyone but himself.

“Cliff?”

Kate.

Cliff spun around to see her leaning against the doorframe, just as Cliff remembered, or as close to that as she could be. Her blonde hair, styled with bouncy curls, emerald green eyes lined with mascara. Her face was a partially blurred but the familiar dark red lipstick lips were there, curled in question. 

“Hey, Kate.” He breathed out, noting distantly the moving of his lips and tongue to avoid thinking about how heavy and foreign her name felt to say. 

“Hey, baby,” Cool breeze was breathed out by the open window, the white violes rippling in a dream-like reply as she sauntered over to him. Her right hand reached out and cupped his cheek tenderly, skin against skin for the first time in a long time and he leant into it desperately.

They stayed like that for awhile, warm sun soaking into their skin. Then Kate broke the silence, eyes holding an unbearable weight Cliff felt hopelessly responsible for. 

“You’ve been gone so long, Honey, where’d you go?” 

Cliff knew this was a construction of his own mind. He knew it was, he knew it, he

“I’m here now, baby, I’m here.” 

A quiet hum escaped her lips as she caressed his cheek with her thumb, Cliff leaned in further, his eyes fluttering shut in content.

“I don’t know what happened to us, I’m gonna be better.”

Cliff froze, eyes snapping open only to see that instead of Kate, he was now face to face with himself, its - his? - hand still caressing his cheek, warm. The familiar crackle of static from the recording echoed through the room and the other him opened its mouth. 

“I don’t know what happened to us, I’m gonna be better.” His slurred half-assed promise he made a thousand times, listened to a thousand times, heard from his father's mouth a thousand times. It repeated the voicemail persistently no matter how loud Cliff shouted “SHUT THE FUCK UP.” 

The recording became slurred and garbled, its face morphing between Cliff’s face and Kate’s until even the faces became jumbled together in a sludge. Eventually it became an inaudible white noise and the bathroom fuzzed into view, tap still on, the rush pounding in his head. Cliff was still lying in the same position as he had when he fell, eyes up at the ceiling. 

“Oh, fuck me.” 

It took awhile for him to notice the soft knocks from his bedroom door and Cliff ignored it momentarily, content in lying on the floor and wallowing, hoping whoever it was would give up and leave him alone again, just like he deserved. But they didn’t. The raps slowed and another thump resonated through, perhaps a head resting onto the wood in forbearance, a muffled voice called out his name. 

Cliff groaned and stood up awfully quickly, this time without the memory of gravity giving him time to rise, and staggered over to the door, head hazy, his aim was all over the place. The sick remnants of being drunk wormed their way into his mind and Kate came back full force. Cliff thought it would be better to stop thinking all together. 

He opened the door and found Larry waiting on the other side. Cliff opened and closed the shutters for his eyes a few times to make sure it really was him and not his head again. But it was really Larry, standing just outside his room, bandaged hands in pockets and all.

“Hey…” Larry said, the hint of a smirk in his voice “I heard a lot of shouting and banging, just thought I might check in, you know, to make sure there’s no elephant in the house. Again.” 

Larry. 

Cliff tried to say something audible, something worthwhile, but everything choked together and he just stared, sad and dumbfounded at the man in front of him.

Larry suddenly became somewhat sheepish - perhaps from Cliff’s lack of reaction - and pushed himself into his coat, hands wrapping tightly around the wool. “Did you want to - if you want - do you,” Larry stammered out and Cliff waited for Larry to finish all the while trying so hard not to go insane. “Do you want to talk about it?” 

Cliff nodded his head heavily, opening his door a little wider to invite Larry in and he went over to sit on the bed while Cliff just collapsed backwards onto the floor again. This time, head cocked to the side, not looking at Larry but in the direction of him. They stayed like that for awhile, silent and unsure what to say as Larry sat patiently, waiting for cliff with his hands settled nicely in his lap, observing the details of his room. 

“I’m an asshole, Larry.” 

Larry moved his gave from the picture frames lazy strewn about on the dresser and looked at Cliff. “Yeah.” 

“I just - I can’t even fucking do anything about it. My wife is dead and I - I can’t tell her how fucking sorry I am.” Larry jostled around on the bed, fidgeting with his hands before picking the right thing to say.

“Your daughter’s still here Cliff.” The tone of Larry’s soft and sympathetic comment was so contrasted against the usual condescending tone everyone gave Cliff when conversations involved his daughter. He didn’t know which tone he would’ve preferred in this moment. 

“I know, it’s just, I’m so fucking scared” Cliff turned his head to look at the ceiling. 

Larry shifted from the bed and onto the floor, kneeling up and leaning his body over Cliff so that he could look right at him. Larry stayed like that for a moment, eyes locked onto his. “Your a fucking robot, Cliff” 

Cliff laughed (sort of) and watched Larry as he feel back onto knees, feeling slightly detached as he did so.

They fell into a silence again, although this one was much steadier. It felt nice, Larry so close to Cliff in his room.

For the first time, in a very long time, the want to feel something, anything at all, didn’t feel all that consuming. Larry made it feel smaller.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading all u dumb gays


End file.
